Film Preview: Beatrix Wood, San Fhuil/ It's In The Blood

Many crofters on South Uist have second jobs to help make ends meet. Some work at the hospital, others at the local missile firing range. Beatrix Wood’s second job is filmmaker. San Fhuil/ It’s in the Blood is her three part documentary series showing the annual cycle of crofting and its twenty first century challenges. The films are centred on the township of Drimsdale where Wood and her family have lived and crofted for the last eight years. 

Every aspect of the crofting year is covered (brace yourself): collecting and spreading seaweed to fertilise the fields before ploughing, sowing and harrowing, cutting and drying peat for fuel, driving the sheep out onto the hills where they winter and gathering them back in again after lambing for castrating, shearing and dipping, dosing and pedicuring cattle, calving, muirburning, roof thatching, taking lambs and calves to market in Lochboisdale, harvesting the oats and barley and preparing silage for winter feed, stacking hay, digging up Kerr's Pinks and Record potatoes for the table, shooting predatory ravens and pestilent greylag geese, lifting cockles off the beach, fixing fences and ageing agricultural equipment, endless paperwork, and moving sheep and cattle away from target areas before rockets are launched. It becomes clear that crofting is very hard work and is reliant both on communal effort and government agency schemes. The economic returns are meagre. A lamb sells for £25 at market, the price of a fillet steak in a city centre restaurant. It begs the question, from an urban dweller's perspective, why do people persist in doing it?

Wood strikes a good balance between showing people in action doing all of the things that make up crofting today and in-depth interviews with crofters young, middle and old aged telling how it is from their perspective. Most of the dialogue is in Gaelic with English subtitles. There is a long tradition of 'outsiders' photographing and filming the people of the Outer Hebrides as 'others' to be observed and represented as fitting a romantic pre-conceived notion of primitive living in harmony with nature. Wood, conversely, paints a truthful and revealing picture very much from the inside. She uses her skill as a filmmaker to weave together a coherent narrative making liberal use of contemporary techniques such as split screen and drone footage, interspersed with archival material from Margaret Fay Shaw and Dr Kenneth Robertson. It is the voices of the crofters however that come across most strongly and directly in articulating their own story. They are characters in a real life drama featuring the timeless struggle between humans and nature. A young man speaks of the need for crofting to adapt to new conditions if it is to survive. The old lament the dilution of a certain richness of the Gaelic tongue whilst very forcefully making the point there really never were any 'good old days'. Although tractors began arriving on South Uist after the war, older people remember their youth as a time of relentlessly hard physical labour. Those of a middling age are concerned with the immediate threat posed by an out of control greylag geese population. 

The greylags attack the corn before harvest time, flattening and fouling it until the cattle will not touch it. Crofters fight a losing battle with the geese using shotguns, fire crackers, fencing and every manner of scarecrow. Another major gripe is the time window within which government agencies encourage crofters to work their arable land. Financial incentives are offered to lengthen the period between ploughing and harvesting. The later the harvest is left, the more chance there is that the geese will destroy the crop. Ironically, one of the main reasons for protecting this time window is to allow threatened bird species the opportunity to successfully reproduce. Irony upon irony, the main reason the greylag population has exploded over the last thirty years is also because of environmental policy. Crows were culled to prevent them eating greylag eggs. Without natural predators the geese population has increased almost tenfold.

The local priest, Father Michael MacDonald, speaks eloquently of the history of the island and in particular the relationship between the crofters and the military. At first they were welcomed because of the positive impact expected on the local economy but once the scale of their intended operations became apparent, novel techniques were used to remind the British Army that they were dealing with a unique culture quite different from their own. Notably, the priest at the time, Canon John Morrison, encouraged the siting of wayside statues of the Virgin Mary at the crossing of military roads. This tactic became manifest in 1957 in the strategically placed monolithic granite statue, Our Lady of the Isles, the most recognisable landmark of South Uist apart from her three hills. The military's development plans were scaled back. Now, says Father Michael, the greatest threat to the island is depopulation. In 1849 shortly before the clearances swept many local crofters off to Canada the population peaked at 7,300. Today there are less than 3,000 on the island. One of the most worrying demographic trends is the tendency for young people to leave, though some do return.

Through all of the hard work and challenges inherent in trying to maintain a delicate environmental balance, there is something about this crofting way of life that endures. The answer to the question why people persist with crofting lies, very often, in the title of this series of films, San Fhuil/ It’s in the Blood. The people crofting on South Uist today typically belong to families who have crofted there for generations. Many incomers, such as the Woods, come themselves from families who have farmed elsewhere in the British Isles. Peripheral lands like South Uist act as a haven for some who want to farm but who are dissatisfied with modern industrial farming methods. They come and they learn and they reciprocate by helping maintain this way of life. Survival relies on appropriate development. The islanders bought most of South Uist in Scotland's largest community buyout in 2006. Since then they have partly determined their own future through development of a new marina and the introduction of wind turbines. These offer employment and revenue to supplement the crofting income. It is a fine thing to have the highest concentration of native Gaelic speakers anywhere in the world but as Father Michael says, "you cannot eat culture". These films are about crofting on South Uist but they operate more broadly as a metaphor for the time we live in.  With climate change becoming a more pressing issue by the day, we need to watch more films like these and consider more carefully an appropriate relationship with our natural resources.

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The films will be broadcast on BBC Alba commencing November 28th 2018 and will be available on iPlayer. Link to programmes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001bdf

All images © Beatrix A Wood

Image captions in order of appearance:

1. Alisdair MacAskill gathering, Bhein Mhor
2. Seaweed spreading
3. Cador Wood and Elvis bringing peat home
4. Goose
5. Angus John Laing and Archie MacRurie stacking
6. Angie holding cockles